What Tween Girls Want

With 25 million kids in this country between the age of 8 and 13, tweens are the most powerful consumer group since the baby boom.  And tween girls (many of whom can’t even go to the mall by themselves) love to shop - it’s a social activity, a lifestyle, a coming-of-age exercise in identity-finding.  We’re always looking for great new ideas to appeal to these girls, so we stopped by the first Fashionology store this weekend after reading about it in W. The idea is that girls can design their own clothes using interactive kiosks, customize them at work tables, then model them on a stage area that projects digital pictures to a large in-store screen.

This struck us as a brilliant approach for younger girls who are cutting their style teeth on Project Runway and ANTM - individualized fashion that is also accessible. The store is really well executed. Almost too much so. It’s on a tony block on Beverly Hills across from James Perse, and it feels like there’s plenty of money behind it. The touch screen kiosks are huge - I’ve never seen a touch screen this large, which is sort of a problem since the littlest girls that shop there can’t reach the top icons on the screen without someone lifting them up. The interface is intuitive but a little linear, so if you select your theme (Rock, Malibu, Juku, etc.) and then go through picking the item you want (shirt, dress, whatever), you can’t easily see what the options were in the other themes. There are only a few kiosks and a whole lot of work tables with Bedazzlers mounted on them. It seems like the idea is for moms to sit and sew/bedazzle with their girls, but the really cool part of the process, the kiosks, only gets you to the counter with a fairly blank tshirt and some stuff for you to apply yourself. In other words, girls are not really designing the clothes, they’re accessorizing them.

The bad news is that the bling is expensive. I watched one girl pick out her various design elements, and her grandmother made her back up and take some of them off because the $32.50 short sleeve shirt had turned into a $72 item in a few quick clicks. This strikes me as a serious problem if the chain is to go national. This price point is just too high for most 10 year olds, especially when the result is no different from what you could get from a trip to a good craft store. On the other hand, the “stage” is brilliant, and it’s a pretty inexpensive setup to have a digital camera on a timer capturing girls modelling the designs they’ve created. I could easily see major retailers taking this concept and running with it. I could also see this being a great place for a birthday party for tween girls, although the parents would be well advised to set some spending limits in advance.